Out of Office (Permanently)

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Out of Office Reply
by Jace Wilder

One year later. Adrian takes Leo back to Lisbon. Same apartment. Same rooftop terrace. Same hammock he swore he’d never get in again. A tiny blue mug. An auto-reply that says permanently. And the most joyful chapter in the series.

⚠️ Spoiler Warning: This chapter takes place after the events of Out of Office Reply. Read the novel first.

Leo figured it out at the gate.

I’d been meticulous. The coordination had required three weeks of planning, a co-conspirator in Maria Cruz who’d packed Leo’s bag under the pretense of a “family trip to the Poconos,” and the kind of spreadsheet-level logistics that I usually reserved for quarterly operations reviews.

The Poconos deception held through the car ride to the airport. It held through the terminal. It held through security, where Leo cheerfully removed his belt and shoes and chatted with the TSA agent about sneaker brands while I managed the boarding passes with the rigid composure of a man concealing international travel plans from the person standing next to him.

It did not hold past the departure board.

Leo stopped walking. Mid-sentence. His eyes snagged on the screen: LIS — LISBON — GATE B27 — BOARDING

He turned to me. Slowly. The way a man turns toward an explosion he’s already heard.

“Adrian. That says Lisbon.”

“It does.”

“You told my mother we were going to the Poconos.”

“I told your mother a strategically necessary fiction. She was fully complicit. She packed your swim trunks. You’re welcome.”

His face went through a sequence I memorized in real time—surprise, confusion, recognition. And then the smile. The real one. The full, room-filling, Leo-at-maximum-wattage smile that I’d seen for the first time in a break room and had spent a year engineering reasons to see again.

“You brought me back,” he said.

“I brought us back.”

The apartment was the same. The narrow staircase. The blue tile in the kitchen. The terrace—the wide, warm-stone terrace that looked out over the Tagus. And the hammock. Still there. Strung between the same two posts, swaying slightly in the breeze.

I looked at it with the same structural skepticism I’d applied last time.

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were going to suggest the hammock.”

Leo grinned. Uncorked a Douro red he’d selected at a shop in the Alfama. We stood on the terrace. The river below. The city around us—terra cotta rooftops, white walls, the specific golden-hour glow that turned Lisbon into a place that existed outside of time.

“A year,” he said.

“A year.”

He set his wine down and walked to the hammock. Sat in it. Swung his legs up. Settled into the fabric with the full-body trust of a man who didn’t question whether the thing holding him would hold.

“Hammocks are structurally—”

“Unstable. I know. So were we.” He smiled. “Look how that turned out.”

I set my wine down. Crossed the terrace. “Move over.”

I climbed in. The hammock swayed dangerously. Leo’s arm came around me. I grabbed the edge.

“You’re white-knuckling a piece of fabric.”

“It’s a structural concern.”

“Adrian.” His voice close. His mouth near my ear. The cedar body wash—still twelve dollars, still from Target, still the smell I associated with safety and desire. “Let go.”

I let go.

The hammock swayed. My body, no longer fighting the motion, settled into it—the suspension, the drift, the particular physics of being held by something that moved. Leo’s arm tightened around me. My back against his chest. The river below. The sky above.

He pressed his mouth against the back of my neck. Then his hand slid down—over my stomach, over my belt, over the front of my linen pants where my body was responding to the proximity and the hammock and the evening and the specific, Pavlovian association between Leo’s mouth on my neck and the complete dissolution of my higher brain functions.

I turned in the hammock. A logistical challenge—two men, a narrow fabric surface, the constant sway—but I managed it. I kissed him. The wine-dark, warm-air, Lisbon-evening version of a kiss. His hand went under my shirt. My hand went to his belt.

“The hammock can’t handle this,” I said against his mouth.

“Let’s test it.”

His shirt came off. The mango tattoo. Over his heart. I put my mouth on it the way I always did—the greeting, the acknowledgment. His hips rolled against mine. The hammock swayed with the motion—matching us, amplifying us. The instability was the point.

“Terrace,” he gasped. “Now. Before this thing dumps us both.”

The terrace stones were warm from the day’s sun. Leo pulled me out of the hammock—both of us laughing, the hammock swaying empty behind us—and then we were on the terrace. The wide, flat, warm surface under the sky. No walls. No ceiling. No locked door. The most open space we’d ever been together.

Pants came down. Shirts came off. The evening air on bare skin, the breeze from the river, and Leo—naked, golden-lit, standing on a rooftop in Lisbon with his eyes on mine with the look that said I’m yours and I know it and I’ve never been more certain of anything.

“Lie down,” I said.

He lay down on the warm stone. I knelt between his legs. My knees on the surface that had been heated all day by the Portuguese sun. I took him in my mouth and he arched off the terrace and said my name to the sky.

No walls. No ceiling. No room to contain the sound. His voice—saying Adrian, Adrian, fuck, Adrian—rose from the terrace and traveled over the rooftops and into the Lisbon evening. I didn’t shush him. I took him deep and let him be loud because we were done being quiet and we’d been done for a year.

I pulled off. Not to tease. Because I wanted inside him. I wanted the specific, irreplaceable, nothing-else-compares intimacy of being connected to the person I loved on a rooftop in the city where we’d first learned to rest.

“Stay,” I said. “I want to see you.”

He stayed on his back. Looking up at me with the eyes that had looked up at me from a conference room floor eight months into a secret and that now looked up at me from a rooftop terrace one year into a life. The same eyes. Everything different.

His body opened for me the way it always did—gradually, trustingly. His hand found mine. Laced through. The gesture that meant both things—tenderness and intimacy, the hand you held and the body you entered. Both at once. Always both.

I pushed inside him. Slowly. On the warm stone, under the sky, with the river below and his hand in mine and his eyes on my face. No darkness to hide in. No office to excuse us. No rule to blame. Just two men on a rooftop in the golden-to-purple light of a Portuguese evening, choosing each other.

He made a sound. Not a moan—something deeper. Something that came from the place where his body met his heart. The sound carried over the terrace and the rooftops and the river and I didn’t try to contain it. I let it exist. I let us exist. In the open, in the air, in the specific and profound vulnerability of being seen by the sky.

I moved. He moved with me. Deep. Steady. The pace of a man who had all night and all morning and wasn’t in a hurry because the hurrying was over.

His legs came around my waist. His hand went to the back of my neck—pulling me down, pulling my mouth to his, and we kissed while I was inside him, the dual intimacy producing a sensation so total that the distinction between where I ended and he began dissolved.

“Harder,” he said against my mouth. “I want to feel you tomorrow.”

I gave him harder. The warm stone beneath his back, my hands on his hips, driving into him with the force of a man who’d learned that letting go was not the same as falling apart.

He was loud. Full volume. The full-throated, unrestrained, wall-shaking volume of a man who’d been loud his whole life and was finally, on a rooftop with no walls to shake, at his true capacity. His voice rang off the terrace stones and became part of the city’s sound—the fado music from the streets below, the seagulls on the river, the distant hum of a city alive and indifferent to the two men on the rooftop above it.

I reached between us. Stroked in time. His body tightened around me. His hand crushed my fingers. His voice cracked on my name—Adrian—and he came between us with the full-body, nothing-held-back release of a man who’d never learned to be small and had found someone who didn’t want him to be.

I followed. Deep inside him. With the sky above me and his body around me and his hand in mine. Stay. I stayed. Forehead to forehead. Breathing. The after—the moment I used to flee from—held deliberately, consciously, with the full weight of a man who’d learned that the after was not the ending but the beginning.

Morning. The terrace. The Moka pot—purchased yesterday at the Alfama market. Two cups on the terrace railing. One black. One with Portuguese cream from the corner shop, purchased at 5:14 AM while Leo slept. Cream and two sugars. In Lisbon. On a terrace. In a cup from the market where I’d also bought something else.

Leo appeared in the doorway. Sleep-rumpled. Wearing my shirt.

“You made coffee.”

“At 4:50. The alarm doesn’t adjust for time zones.”

He laughed. Took his cup. Sipped. The face—the specific, involuntary, eyes-closing, shoulders-dropping face he made when the coffee was exactly right—was the reason I set the alarm. Every morning. In every time zone.

My phone buzzed. A work email. Below the notification, the preview of the auto-reply:

I’m currently out of the office. For urgent matters, contact Karen Holt. For everything else, I’m with Leo. Permanently.

Leo read it over my shoulder. I felt him go still.

“Permanently?”

“I updated it on the plane.”

“Adrian. Is that a—are you—”

I reached into my pocket. Not a ring box. Something smaller. Something ceramic, wrapped in tissue paper from the market stall where I’d bought it at 5:20 AM while Leo slept.

A mug. Tiny. Espresso-sized. Handmade—the glaze imperfect, the color uneven. Blue. The specific, exact shade of blue that had come to mean everything: the mug in the cabinet, the plates on the shelf, the handles on the forks, the calendar blocks. The color of a man’s place in a life that had been designed for one and renovated for two.

Inside the mug, folded into a square small enough to fit in the ceramic curve, was a note. My handwriting—neat, architectural.

Three mugs now.

Not a proposal. Not yet. The Adrian Vale approach to commitment: infrastructure first, declaration after. Buy the mug before you ask the question. Make the space before you fill it. The ring was being researched—a spreadsheet on my laptop, sixty percent complete, with columns for cut, clarity, carat, and the specific dimensions of Leo Cruz’s ring finger, which I’d measured while he slept using a piece of string and a ruler.

Leo held the tiny blue mug in his palm. Read the note. His eyes went bright—the shimmer of a surface about to break.

“Three mugs,” he said.

“Two at home. One here. For when we come back.”

“When.”

“When. Not if. I’m updating the auto-reply annually. Next year it’ll say I’m with Leo. Obviously. The year after that, I’m with Leo. Where else would I be.”

The tears came. He stood on a rooftop in Lisbon holding a mug the size of his thumb with tears running down his face and my shirt on his back and the river catching the morning light behind him.

“You’re going to need a bigger cabinet,” he said. Through the tears. Through the laugh that lived inside the tears.

“I know.” I watched the river. Held his hand. Held everything I’d spent thirty-four years being afraid to hold and a year learning to keep. “I already ordered one.”

He laughed. The full laugh. The one that carried over rooftops and across rivers and into the specific, extraordinary, ordinary morning of two men drinking coffee on a terrace in Lisbon with a tiny blue mug between them and an auto-reply running and a cabinet being delivered and a ring being researched and a life—their life—stretching out ahead of them like the river, wide and bright and going somewhere neither of them needed to see to trust.

The morning held them.

The coffee was perfect.

They stayed.

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